ESPN.com is dedicating this week to exploring football's spread offense, what it is, how it started, how to stop it, etc. Jeff Miller starts out with tracing the spread offense to Depression-era Texas. He references Fort Worth's Masonic Home, while I believe TCU's Dutch Meyer was more instrumental in the proliferation of the spread offense at the college level. Mark Schlabach also explores the beginning of the spread offense, but he traces it back to "Mouse" Davis and Portland State. While Davis was instrumental in developing the run-n-shoot offense Tiger Ellison invented in the 1960s, the spread offense is somewhat different. The run-n-shoot called for more reading of defensive coverages by the wide receivers, while the spread is more QB-dependent, in my opinion. Also, one of the key differences that has made the spread so dangerous recently is running everything from the shotgun, while the run-n-shoot was often run frm under center. While Schlabach is correct that some of the same concepts from the run-n-shoot are still used in the spread, I still consider the two offenses two different animals.

The more interesting part of the series were the blog posts presented today, on how to defend and stop the spread offenses being used today. I touched on this question briefly last Fall in a series of posts for the Nebraska-Missouri game. Virginia's head coach Al Groh, who is the defensive coordinator for the 'hoos like Pete Carroll is for USC, says being flexible is a key. Groh believes the flexibility of the 3-4 defense can be helpful in defending the spread. This jibes with one of my suggestions on stopping the spread offense, because the 3-4 allows you to get more athletes on the field. I also believe the 33 Stack defense allows you to get the athletes on the field needed to shut down the athletes at wide receiver and running back in the spread offense.

What is nice about this series is that they also interview Pittsburgh defensive coordinator Phil Bennett and Northwestern defensive coordinator Mike Hankwitz, both of whom are former A&M defensive coordinators. I asked Bennett once in 2005 about defenses eventually catching up to the spread offense, and Brian Bennett asks him the same question:

Do you think that, in general, defenses are catching up to the spread?

PB: You know, as soon as you say that, somebody will tear you up.

Now, with the original spread teams, people are starting to say, hey we've seen this. I think we played (against) regular personnel, out of 880 snaps last year, I think we played 90 snaps. And the rest was one back and either one tight, three wides or even four wides. Everybody is so multiple and they're doing variations of the spread. Iowa came out against us, and they had two tights, two flankers, and lo and behold guess what they did? They flexed them out and ran the spread out of it.

I think the more you can focus on something, week after week, people will get better answers. The other thing is, there's a premium on skill players on offense. The thing the spread does is, it creates matchups. And if you got a 4.4 (40-yard dash) wide receiver against a 4.8 linebacker, that's a great matchup. You've got to be able to swarm the ball, and you can't have too many of those matchups.

My one big disappointment is that when they wanted to talk to a Big 12 defensive coordinator about defending the spread, they talked to Tech's Ruffin McNeill. I give Tim Griffin credit for not asking "So, why didn't this work against Oklahoma?", but the truth is, McNeill has perfected the art of answering questions while not really saying much of anything. I would much rather have heard an interview from Oklahoma State's Bill Young or texas' Will Muschamp or even our own Joe Kines on their thoughts on the spread offense. All three of them have much more experience than McNeill, who is entering only his second season as a full-time defensive coordinator at Tech.

I think this series is an excellent idea by ESPN, though, so I can't complain too much.